What is the average money donation for John McCain?

Question

What is the average money donation for John McCain?

Answer 1

Well, this turns out to be a little more complicated than I thought due to the complications inherent in McCain receiving public funding.  Here is the best explanation I've found:

Earlier, I compared the average donation size of John McCain's public finance loophole fundraising to the average donation size of Barack Obama's campaign fundraising -- $5,754 for McCain and $68 for Obama.

This isn't entirely an apples-to-apples comparison, of course. It's a little tricky doing an apples-to-apples because not all the data is available to do one, but I decided to take an estimate.

My goal here is to estimate the average donation size for the combined total of McCain's official campaign fundraising and his public finance loophole (RNC) fundraising, and to do the same with Obama's official campaign fundraising and his DNC rundraising.

Let's start with Barack Obama, who raised $52 million last month for his campaign. The DNC raised $22.5 million last month. The Obama campaign says the average donation size was $68 for its campaign. If we assume that 100% of the DNC fundraising came from contributors maxing out, then the combined average would be a bit under $100. Since we're estimating, let's use $100 as the average amount for Obama.

On the McCain side, since he became the nominee, he's raised $62.5 million for his campaign at the RNC, averaging $5,754 per donor. He hasn't released the over donation size for his campaign, but through May, he'd raised $104 million dollars. 74% of that came from 65,710 contributors who donated at least $200. Their average donation size was $1,180. So now the question is what about the $27 million raised from smaller donors? There were at least 136,219 of them (they can give no more than $200 apiece without being identified). Let's assume their average donation size was $50 -- that would make for 550,000 donations, give or take a few. (I suspect this is being generous to McCain.)

That leaves us with McCain having raised $166.5 million from about 625,000 donors (this excludes his June campaign report which has not yet been filed) and would put his average donation at about $266.

So my bottom-line guess here (barring any major math error) is that the average McCain donation is at least 2.5x the average Obama donation.